On the eve of the publication of the long-awaited report by the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, a new article in a respected academic journal claims the killings were the result of “a calculated plan to stage a large-scale confrontation devised at a very high level”. This contrasts sharply with accounts which support the “cock-up” theory, attributing the deaths of demonstrators to a series of errors of “interpretation and communication”.
The Saville Inquiry – the longest and most expensive in British legal history – was set up in 1998 by Tony Blair to look into what happened on January 30 1972 when British soldiers shot dead 13 civil rights marchers in Londonderry; another died later. Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward expects to receive the final report next week.
But Niall Ó Dochartaigh, a lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, writing in Contemporary British History, argues that, rather than being a consequence of a confused situation on the ground, the events of Bloody Sunday resulted directly from plans to stage a massive confrontation in order to shatter an established policy of security force restraint. He also, controversially, contends that a foreseeable consequence of the operation, devised by one of the most senior military commanders in Northern Ireland, was the killing of civilians.
He says that while the Government and elements in the security forces endorsed a policy of “relative restraint”, others in the security forces favoured a “much more repressive approach”. He argues that these elements drove the confrontational initiative that was put into operation on Bloody Sunday.
